BT One Phone chases enterprise market

BT has set its sights on the mobile enterprise market with the launch of its cloud-based UC offering BT One Phone.

The service routes all calls to an employee’s mobile whether they are made to a landline, extension number or mobile number. It will work with any phone by inserting a BT One Phone SIM, with the firm claiming potential cost savings of up to 50 per cent for customers.

It said the hosted service will allow employee mobile phones to operate like a desk phone, meaning they can work remotely or flexibly with no problems.

In most cases, One Phone installation will involve building a dedicated mobile network inside a customer’s premises to ensure excellent indoor coverage. Outdoor it will use EE’s network including 4G as part of the MVNO agreement it signed with the operator last year. Customers will also have access to BT’s five million WiFi hotspots nationwide.

The project is the focal point of BT’s strategy to increase its share of the enterprise market, which it claims currently sits at one per cent. It declined to provide details on the number of connections it currently manages or what it would like to grow its base to.

BT commercial marketing and online managing director John Thorneycroft said: “We’ve already got a starting position in the mobile market and in some segments we have got a good few per cent market share. We want to be one of the leading figures in the mobile market.

“We’ll primarily be competing with the mobile firms but the service is essentially swapping out the phone system and calls so in many ways this competes with large swathes of the market.

“We’ve had a lot of interest mainly because this is focused at SMEs. We’ve only started having initial sales conversations in the last few weeks but people are very interested.”